You see all kinds of internet marketing information everywhere and how to get filthy rich sitting at home in your underwear. That is hard to compete with and I won't even try. It isn't something I am qualified to talk about since my monthly income from affiliate marketing is just a few hundred.
There is something I can talk about, though. I brought my monthly marketing consulting practice income up from nothing to five figures. How? Other than a $500 ad I placed over a year ago, I only used internet marketing strategies.
The costs of my marketing is covered by approximately 2% of my sales. The time spent prospecting and hunting for new clients is nothing. I do have to admit that the newsletter I write and send out does help to draw in new clients but it is not at all like the traditional method of cold calling potential prospects.
Of course, there are plenty of people who have gotten results better and faster. There are also a good number of people who are still struggling to set up a good lead generating website and would be glad to get tips that work from someone like me.
So I am going to share some of the successful strategies I have used in building my consulting business. The same tactics in generating those top quality sales leads that have eluded you might work just as well for you even if your business is of a different nature.
I need to make it clear that it took a lot of trial and error before I arrived at these successful tactics. To get lasting results, you have to stay with these tactics to get over the plateaus.
1. Be different
How attractive your target audience views your offers will be affected by the manner in which you position yourself.
For web designers, a web site is the final product. They create wonderfully visual websites and most of them are competent in the technical aspects.
Our pitch has always been Results. In other words, "we don't just build websites, we provide you with an automated revenue-generating tool".
Then we back up what we say with plenty of useful online marketing information and online marketing case studies that reinforce this claim.
This pitch seems to attract a good number of business owners. It has a greater effect than making the claim of being expert at XHTML, PHP, Java Script and all sorts of other terms that have no meaning to you. You want to know whether we can make you site pay for itself.
2. Impart Education
In a business such as marketing consulting, sales are based on trust. Clients have to understand that they are getting good value and can benefit greatly from the products and services you offer them.
In the quest to educate and build trust, I distribute a newsletter and online marketing guide that is free to prospects so they can see our expertise in our field and a few of the solutions they may need for problems they face. A newsletter subscriber will contact us about setting up a business arrangement if he or she finds that our approach suits their goals.
Educating prospect before selling to them works far better than the usual sales pitch does. Making use of evaluations, case studies, white papers, and newsletters that have solid value relevant to your market can give you good targeted leads.
Again, there's a great deal of free information available on the Internet. It can be hard to get traction. To make this strategy work, your subject matter either has to be truly unique or of very high quality. I try to give away information, strategies and advice that prospects would normally have to pay for elsewhere.
3. Everything must be tested
Quite a few marketing tactics did not bring very good results, such as paid link exchanges, banner ad services and PPC search engines. When we knew they would have sub-par results, we stopped using them before they got too expensive.
Some things, such as Google Adwords, did work very well. To keep the success going, we worked to further optimize and expand on those tactics that were proving to produce the results we wanted.
You will find it rather difficult to fail if you expand on the strategies that are getting the best results.
4. Take charge of your education
Since the internet is not static and new innovations are developed continually, it is necessary to keep current on them. Making an investment in software, ebooks and courses, as well as reading blogs is one of the best ways to keep up with these developments. You will find a lot of wonderful profit-building tools out there after sorting through all the outdated garbage being offered. It makes more sense to avoid the trial and error route yourself and hire someone for about $100 who has already been through all that and can teach you about what works and why it works.
I invest about $300 to $500 a month in self-education and info products.
5. Understand the elements of online success
These four things are necessary to keep current on if you are to build a successful lead generating system:
1. Strategy - the manner in which your sales process is set up. If your service or product is fairly complicated or expensive, this is especially important.
2. Design - not flashy graphics and animations, but design that is dead easy for users to understand
3. Sales copy - Users must be motivated by your content to take the action of contacting you for more information. The results of your lead generation is significantly affected by the quality of your sales copy.
4. Targeted traffic - The more targeted your traffic is, the better your sales figures will be.
I regularly exam all of these things so I can make necessary improvements when and where they are needed.
Keep improvement ongoing
If the pace is not fast enough and your lead generating results are slim, you can easily get impatient and frustrated. It take consist effort over a period of time to improve the results you see online. Hiring someone with expertise in this area will help you cut the learning curve short. If your primary business is not internet marketing, you may want to do this. - 15478
There is something I can talk about, though. I brought my monthly marketing consulting practice income up from nothing to five figures. How? Other than a $500 ad I placed over a year ago, I only used internet marketing strategies.
The costs of my marketing is covered by approximately 2% of my sales. The time spent prospecting and hunting for new clients is nothing. I do have to admit that the newsletter I write and send out does help to draw in new clients but it is not at all like the traditional method of cold calling potential prospects.
Of course, there are plenty of people who have gotten results better and faster. There are also a good number of people who are still struggling to set up a good lead generating website and would be glad to get tips that work from someone like me.
So I am going to share some of the successful strategies I have used in building my consulting business. The same tactics in generating those top quality sales leads that have eluded you might work just as well for you even if your business is of a different nature.
I need to make it clear that it took a lot of trial and error before I arrived at these successful tactics. To get lasting results, you have to stay with these tactics to get over the plateaus.
1. Be different
How attractive your target audience views your offers will be affected by the manner in which you position yourself.
For web designers, a web site is the final product. They create wonderfully visual websites and most of them are competent in the technical aspects.
Our pitch has always been Results. In other words, "we don't just build websites, we provide you with an automated revenue-generating tool".
Then we back up what we say with plenty of useful online marketing information and online marketing case studies that reinforce this claim.
This pitch seems to attract a good number of business owners. It has a greater effect than making the claim of being expert at XHTML, PHP, Java Script and all sorts of other terms that have no meaning to you. You want to know whether we can make you site pay for itself.
2. Impart Education
In a business such as marketing consulting, sales are based on trust. Clients have to understand that they are getting good value and can benefit greatly from the products and services you offer them.
In the quest to educate and build trust, I distribute a newsletter and online marketing guide that is free to prospects so they can see our expertise in our field and a few of the solutions they may need for problems they face. A newsletter subscriber will contact us about setting up a business arrangement if he or she finds that our approach suits their goals.
Educating prospect before selling to them works far better than the usual sales pitch does. Making use of evaluations, case studies, white papers, and newsletters that have solid value relevant to your market can give you good targeted leads.
Again, there's a great deal of free information available on the Internet. It can be hard to get traction. To make this strategy work, your subject matter either has to be truly unique or of very high quality. I try to give away information, strategies and advice that prospects would normally have to pay for elsewhere.
3. Everything must be tested
Quite a few marketing tactics did not bring very good results, such as paid link exchanges, banner ad services and PPC search engines. When we knew they would have sub-par results, we stopped using them before they got too expensive.
Some things, such as Google Adwords, did work very well. To keep the success going, we worked to further optimize and expand on those tactics that were proving to produce the results we wanted.
You will find it rather difficult to fail if you expand on the strategies that are getting the best results.
4. Take charge of your education
Since the internet is not static and new innovations are developed continually, it is necessary to keep current on them. Making an investment in software, ebooks and courses, as well as reading blogs is one of the best ways to keep up with these developments. You will find a lot of wonderful profit-building tools out there after sorting through all the outdated garbage being offered. It makes more sense to avoid the trial and error route yourself and hire someone for about $100 who has already been through all that and can teach you about what works and why it works.
I invest about $300 to $500 a month in self-education and info products.
5. Understand the elements of online success
These four things are necessary to keep current on if you are to build a successful lead generating system:
1. Strategy - the manner in which your sales process is set up. If your service or product is fairly complicated or expensive, this is especially important.
2. Design - not flashy graphics and animations, but design that is dead easy for users to understand
3. Sales copy - Users must be motivated by your content to take the action of contacting you for more information. The results of your lead generation is significantly affected by the quality of your sales copy.
4. Targeted traffic - The more targeted your traffic is, the better your sales figures will be.
I regularly exam all of these things so I can make necessary improvements when and where they are needed.
Keep improvement ongoing
If the pace is not fast enough and your lead generating results are slim, you can easily get impatient and frustrated. It take consist effort over a period of time to improve the results you see online. Hiring someone with expertise in this area will help you cut the learning curve short. If your primary business is not internet marketing, you may want to do this. - 15478
About the Author:
About the author: David B. Ascot's expertise is in improving sales lead generation results and your business can benefit from his winning strategies of online lead generation.
